Sovereign Intimacies

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“Sovereign Intimacies,” 2020, installation view (photo courtesy of Plug In ICA)

Writing about the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, the Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective wrote, “better the admission of a future mutuality of strangeness than the bitter explosive ancestral familiarity of hatred.” A curatorial collaboration in Winnipeg by Nasrin Himada and Jennifer Smith turns to this future mutuality as a field of possibility in a time of social isolation and political division.

Sovereign Intimacies is a group exhibition and virtual program developed between Plug In ICA and Gallery 1C03 that will run until Dec. 20. It brings together the work of Hassaan Ashraf, Annie Beach, Ayumi Goto, iris yirei hu, melannie monoceros, Peter Morin, Mariana Muñoz Gomez, Wanda Nanibush, M. NourbeSe Philip, Meghann O’Brien, Marie-Anne Redhead, Cheyenne Thomas and David Thomas.

In Canada, as in India, Palestine and Mexico, colonial narratives have worked to stoke fires instead of allowing cross-cultural solidarities to emerge between diverse communities. This is abundantly clear in Canada, where alliances between Indigenous, Black and People of Colour have historically been suppressed.

Fearful of anti-colonial agitations in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Canadian government silenced the intimacies borne of the historical intersection of settler colonialism, the African slave trade and the indentured labour of Chinese and Indian workers. Today, we have little access to the knowledges exchanged between these peoples, imparting a profound loss in our collective present.

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“Sovereign Intimacies,” 2020, installation view (photo courtesy of Plug In ICA)

If anything, this loss has activated a generation of artists, curators and thinkers to materialize all that is historically unapproachable. For Himada, a Palestinian curator from Tio’tia:ke (Montréal), and Smith, a Métis curator from Treaty One Territory, diaspora is a shared cultural approach that acknowledges movement and transformation in both Indigenous and racialized histories. 

Peter Morin and Ayumi Goto’s collaborative practice in particular is a powerful axis for the anticipatory desires of the exhibition, which seeks to carve out diaspora through sovereignties for self-affirmation and intimacies between difference in the present. 

First inspiring Smith with their 2018 exhibition, how do you carry the land?, at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the pair’s work Gift – 遠足 (Ensoku) is included in Sovereign Intimacies. One of their presentations is floor-based and calls on the act of gift-exchange as a form of knowledge sharing. On a screen-printed blanket, carefully wrapped parcels exchanged between the artists are laid out alongside a new one produced by the artists for the curators. In their desire to speak intimately from the location of their ancestral histories, they take on the role of host and guest to materialize future understandings and empathies.

For the virtual iteration of the exhibition, Smith and Himada invited other curators, including Mariana Muñoz Gomez and Marie-Anne Redhead, who organized a short-video program, Un/Spoken. Here, gifts are exchanged between the artists and their ancestors through the mode of language. Narratives and visuals of remembrance, speculation and familiarity float amongst the program’s six videos. Poetry, in particular, is called on to rewrite histories through the vantage point of Indigenous and racialized subjects, to imagine more collaborative forms of living together. 

As Himada puts it in the epistolary curatorial text, “the process of getting to know someone means there is possibility for transformation.” These moments of transformations are the gaps in which, according to Smith, “intimacies grow.” Rather than advocating for sameness, the curators and artists in Sovereign Intimacies materialize mutualities of difference.

Strangeness between artists and curators ultimately has become the generous skin through which survival is ensured for people recovering from the colonial damage of the last few centuries. Living in close proximity, we can strategize new ways of being together. ■ 

Sovereign Intimacies at Plug In ICA and Gallery 1C03 from Sept. 26 to Dec. 20, 2020.

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